Lahti, with Paul Sorvino, celebrates her Oscar win for best live action short film.

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It’s March 25, 1996. The biggest power couples of the moment—Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern—arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a night that would be dominated by Braveheart, host Whoopi Goldberg, and a lot of Sharon Stone reaction shots.

Our guest this week, Christine Lahti, was right there in the thick of it at the 1996 Oscars, which Richard Lawsonrecapped for us last month. On this week’s Little Gold Men, Lahti tells Richard and Katey Rich about the highlights of the evening, from fake competitiveness with Goldblum to having to sneak into Sardi’s through the kitchen for an after-party. A winner that night for directing and starring in the short film Lieberman in Love, Lahti—already an Oscar nominee for 1985’s Swing Shift—took on the film because, as she said, “It was a great, funny, comedic, sexy part—nobody was casting me in funny, sexy parts, so I said I’m gonna star in it, and I’m gonna direct it, and it turned out pretty well.”

She now has an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Golden Globe—the one she famously won while in the bathroom—keeping each other company at home, though they’ve gone through some transformations over the years. “When the kids were young, my daughter would dress up my Emmy and my Oscar,” Lahti says. “My Emmy had Barbie clothes on it all the time, and my Oscar had Ken-doll clothes on it. And that seemed fitting, and kind of adorable, and you know, took away some of the gravitas, which I think is important.”

Also on this week’s episode, we look at the latest buzz around two springtime films that might be part of Oscar season later on, discuss the week’s new release Batman v Superman, and make bold, probably insane predictions about who would win best supporting actor if the Oscars were held . . . tomorrow.